Yesterday afternoon, he corrected himself. It’s past midnight.
He returned his attention to the words scrolling down the desktop screen. Gibberish. No sense to them. “Sun, cook river, make house unknown word, unknown word.” With a shake of his head Graycloud decided that his latest stab at assigning words to the Martian symbols was a complete flop. With a touch of a key he blanked the screen, then called up the images of the Martian pictographs.
They mean something, Graycloud told himself. But what? He yawned again and noticed that it was actually well past one a.m.
Get some sleep, he told himself. The comm center doesn’t need you sitting here all night. Messages from Earth are routed automatically, and we don’t have anybody out on an excursion so there won’t be any calls from outside the dome. If anything goes wrong with the life-support systems the alarms will whoop everybody wide awake in two seconds.
He reached for the keyboard to shut down the computer, but the Martian images entranced him. They’ve been sitting on that wall for millions of years, he told himself. They can wait another couple of hours. Yet he kept staring at them as if he could make the symbols speak to him. He fell asleep in his chair in front of the computer screen.
Bright morning sunlight slanted through the dome’s transparent walls as Jamie stared at his desktop screen. His cubbyhole of an office was bare except for the laptop computer resting on the shaky folding table and the other, empty chair. The thin, flexible smart screens that he had taped to the cubicle’s partitions were blank, gray. Only his laptop showed Dex Trumball’s earnest face.
Dex had warned him to plug in the earphone for this message; he didn’t want anyone to overhear it. Now, as Jamie sat listening to his proposal, he understood why.
“I know it goes against the grain, Jamie,” Dex was saying, “but we’ve got to face the facts. If you want to keep the program going, this is the only way to get the funding you need.”
Dex was at his home on Boston’s North Shore, Jamie could see: in his darkly paneled den. Through the narrow window behind Dex, Jamie could see thickly leaved maple trees glowing red and gold in the afternoon sun. It must be autumn in New England, he thought in a separate part of his mind as he tried to digest what Dex was saying.
“It won’t be like a swarm of tourists, Jamie. This’ll be strictly a high-end operation. Rollie Kinnear figures he can get fifty million a pop. Fifty million each! If we ferry ten people to Mars for a week’s visit, that’s half a billion dollars, gross. Do that three, four times a year and we can support your people indefinitely.”
Ten wealthy tourists, Jamie thought. Then ten more. Then twenty, twenty-five. A hundred. A thousand. They’ll trample around here and ruin everything. We won’t be able to get any work done. They’ll want souvenirs: Be the first in your crowd to bring back a rock from Mars! Look, I brought a piece of pottery from the Martian village! Jamie shuddered.
“I’ve talked it over with the Navaho president and her council,” Dex was going on. “They’re not crazy about the idea but they’ll go along with it because it can bring in money for them.”
Let the palefaces have their little settlement by the water’s edge, Jamie thought with the bitterness of tribal memory. There’s only a few of them and the land is wide and free.
Dex was saying, “Um, the council voted to approve the plan, but only providing that you handle the operation from your end. You personally. They don’t trust anybody else to take care of the tourists properly, see that they don’t mess things up over there.”
You want me to be the Judas, Jamie answered silently. Open up Mars to tourism and let Jamie take the responsibility.
He listened to Dex’s words and watched his erstwhile friend’s face closely as the man spoke. Dex’s expression alternated from earnest enthusiasm to worried apprehension to an almost truculent insistence.
“I know you won’t like this idea, Jamie, but it’s the only way we can raise enough money to keep you guys going. Otherwise we’re going to have to shut down the whole operation and bring you all back home.”
And once we leave, your friends can come in and set up a wide-open tourism operation. See the Martian cliff dwellings! Plant your footprints where no human being has stood before! Walk through an ancient Martian village!
Strangely, Jamie felt no anger. Only a deep, aching, sullen remorse, the kind of pain that grips the heart when a dream is shattered.
Dex had finished talking. His image waited frozen on the laptop’s small screen.
Jamie looked out through the open doorway of his cubicle toward the rusty red, rock-strewn ground. Mars is dying, he heard Zeke Larkin say. And he knew that Zeke was right. This is a dying world. And we’re dying with it.
Fingering the communicator clipped to his ear, Jamie said, “Dex, the answer is no. Thanks for your effort. I know you think you’re doing what needs to be done. But no. Not now. Not while I live.”
He turned off the laptop, knowing it would take more than ten minutes for his reply to reach Earth. God knows how long it’ll take Dex to react. Jamie shook his head. It doesn’t matter what his reaction is. It doesn’t matter if he quits the program altogether and cuts off his foundation’s funding completely. None of that matters.
Yet Jamie feared he was wrong. He was cutting off the exploration team’s lifeblood. While it might take a million years for the last Martian lichen to shrivel and die from lack of water, the human explorers on Mars would disappear in a matter of months, for lack of funds.
Billy Graycloud had raised his fist to rap on the partition of Dr. Waterman’s office, but saw that Jamie was staring intently at his laptop screen, comm unit clipped to his ear.
He won’t want to be disturbed, Graycloud thought. He turned and went to the cafeteria, sipped briefly at a mug of weak coffee, then walked back to the cubicle. The laptop was closed now; Dr. Waterman was sitting stiffly in his little chair, staring at infinity.
“Uh… Dr. W?”
Jamie stirred and focused on Graycloud. “Billy. What is it?”
“Got a minute?”
With a nod, “Sure. Come in.”
Graycloud settled onto the only other chair in the cubbyhole, his long legs bumping the wobbly little table on which the laptop sat, his knees poking up awkwardly.
“It’s the translation, sir.”
“What about it, Billy?”
“It’s not goin’ anyplace. I’ve tried about a hundred sets of words, you know, definitions for each of the symbols—but they don’t make any sense.”
Jamie smiled tiredly. “Maybe the hundred and first.”
“Maybe.”
“Or the thousandth.”
Graycloud started to reply, hesitated, then asked, “Are we gonna be here that long?”
Selene: Nanolab
“I haven’t been in here since Kris Cardenas left for the Saturn habitat,” said Doug Stavenger.
“She was a great scientist,” Doreen McManus said.
“Still is, I suppose,” Stavenger replied. “Way out there in orbit around Saturn.”
Selene’s nanotechnology laboratory was quiet and almost empty at this time of the evening. All the regular staff had left for the day. The reactors where virus-sized nanomachines were working ran silently, turning raw materials such as carbon powder into sheets of pure diamond structural material for spacecraft. New nanomachines were incubating in other reactors, behind sealed hatches.